entrepreneurial career we have always
been a team in fact we have another
woman that makes up our trio but
speaking in front of people is in her
strong suit so she decided we should
take this one she’s in the audience
somewhere the three of us have been a
team that has evolved over the past six
years of friendship three of those years
on intense journey has brought us here
today we like to think that the way we
met was fate we met in our very first
architectural drafting class at
university Madeline had come from a gap
year in India Lizzio transferred schools
and I was switching majors we had no
connections to each other but somehow
gravitated towards one another looking
back we were uniquely different women
with a shared spirit to be out of the
ordinary and an inherent drive to do
something big
separately we were three strong
individuals but together we were one a
hell of a powerful unit Henry Ford says
coming together is a beginning keeping
together is progress working together is
success we can finally say we’ve reached
stage 3 and would like to impart some of
what we’ve learned along the way being 3
woman’s navigating the tech startup
world has been an adventure that never
ceases to amaze and surprise us almost
on a daily basis we have grown
individually as women but more
importantly have grown as a team we have
been a team in all sense of the word we
were a team navigating through
University and Design School we were a
team facing a parents divorce cancer
death and an incurable diagnosis and we
were a team deciding to start our first
business our junior year of college some
friends come together when spirits are
high and there is something to celebrate
others come together in grief and in
support we came together to face it all
a quote from Winston Churchill that
perfectly describes us and how we now
define success success is stumbling from
failure to failure with no loss of
enthusiasm through our time together
we’ve learned that failure is a huge and
inevitable part of life what sets you
apart from your failure is your ability
your ability to accept the failure and
have an enthusiasm and willingness to
keep going life is 10% the things that
happen to you 90% how you react to those
things we’ve developed a mantra on our
fan trip friendship that we’ve
integrated into our company today fail
fast fix fast and learn fast a lot of
people ask us how we can be such close
friends and run a business together to
live together also there’s a lot of work
together all the time if we boil it down
it actually comes down to the stamina
that we’ve been able to maintain through
every last hiccup one of our first
failures in business was when we decided
to enter a business plan competition our
junior year of college we had decided we
were going to start a virtual interior
design company we didn’t know exactly
what it meant all we knew is that we
were going to start charging for a
service that we were already providing
our friends and family designing their
spaces through photographs and online
shopping something we definitely knew
how to do around that time our
university was hosting a school-wide
business plan competition with a $60,000
prize to start your first business the
power of three made us courageous enough
to say let’s apply so we had two weeks
to write an executive summary small
problem what’s an executive summary
we attended a lecture for all of the
applicants to get to know one another
and to learn how to write this so-called
executive summary and business plan and
as we sat there in the lecture it was
filled with mostly business and grad
students and of course mostly men then
we were really actually the first people
from our design school to apply so as we
sat there listening we felt very blonde
very out of place and very intimidated
something special about our trio is that
when one of us stumbles when one of us
doesn’t have the courage the other two
are there to pick us up
luckily we have a knack for each
stumbling at different times so there’s
always been someone there with the
silver lining and this case was no
different one of us we won’t name names
did not want to go through with it and
the other to whip her into shape so
needless to say we spent countless
grueling hours poring over exactly what
it meant to start a business and we came
out with our heads held high with the
executive summary of the century we
submitted the proposal the next day and
we got a response rejected our first big
step starting our business and it was a
big fat fail we don’t didn’t know what
we were doing and apparently the idea
wasn’t even good enough to be given the
chance to put a business plan together
this could have ended our journey right
there we could have said we’re proud of
ourselves we tried it is what it is
luckily we had the naive ignorance and
ego that 20 year olds have and decided
to take what we had learned in our
one-page executive summary and put words
into action we had someone in our class
put together a very basic website and
printed business cards and we were ready
for action what followed was two years
of constant and we mean constant ups and
downs failures and small wins in both
our personal lives and in our business
through it all we had our one constant
we were a team that accepted failure we
were a team that found humor in our
little and big dejected moments and we
were a team with a prevailing commitment
to learn and to just keep going Arianna
Huffington says that failure is not the
opposite of success failure is
being stoned to success it’s with that
mentality that we enter darkness next
business competition shark tank we were
coming out of two years of hustle we
were the designers the executives and
wait for it the Handy men installing our
own designs I am so happy to say that we
have mastered the art of the drill we
have won that’s true we had grown and
there was real money flowing into the
business but it wasn’t sustainable
something big had to happen shark tank
was big 8 million viewers money a mentor
that’s what we needed so we went for it
cold emailed casting and we were
accepted into the application process
whoo-hoo what ensued was six months of
video applications and a self-taught MBA
we read text books watch tutorials and
even learn the basics of accounting all
of this was going to be worth it because
once we were on the show it could only
go up from there well basically what
we’re up here presenting as you can
guess Shark Tank wasn’t all we had hoped
it would be although we made a deal on
air the terms were not favorable and it
was not something we could go through
with the episode brought traffic but
nothing meaningful to turn things around
for the future scale and growth of the
business this particular failure brought
about a poignant moment in our journey
that brought us to a company today it
was two months after the episode had
aired and we were still dealing with the
influx of traffic people liked the idea
that was for sure but the economics not
so much it was 2:00 a.m. we hadn’t slept
we were swamped and then we had just
gone an email that episode was rearing
in a week defeated it is exactly how to
define how he felt in that moment we
this kind of exposure should be a
positive not what was inevitably going
to sink us
something big had to happen we had to
make a change so in that moment
exhausted and hangry we all just kind of
looked at each other and started
hysterically laughing almost in a what
the we can’t believe how badly
is hitting the fan kind of life
and somehow in our serie we sunk down
out of our desk chairs and onto the
floor where we lay there side-by-side
taking it all in and as we started to
calm down from our laughter we started
to cry it was a feeling of utter
weakness a moment when we stomped and
didn’t fully know how we would move
forward what if this was a failure that
would break the camel’s back where would
we go from here
all we knew was that we had come too far
and worked too hard to see it all end so
right then in there we decided to make
some substantial changes to fix the
situation we were in what did we learn
from this shark tank failure or shall we
call it an experience number one we
learned that we definitely needed some
real investor money and number two we
learned that we needed some key players
to add to the team first step move to
the west coast immediately to make one
and to happen one of us left our
husbands behind at medical school he’s
not happy
we sublet our apartments and we were in
our headquarters a Starbucks in West LA
within a week from there we met our
game-changing partners and we were
finally in the right place at the right
time it took our unified ability to
accept our failure a resolve to fix and
learn from it and ultimately a belief in
ourselves and what we were doing back to
our friend Winston Churchill success is
not final failure is not fatal it is the
courage to continue that counts
sometimes you need a little help to find
that courage before one of my venture
capital meetings I was in San Francisco
at a coffee shop preparing Madeline
called me task I was because this was
not my first meeting and it was getting
harder and harder to keep the stamina
going I told her how do you think I’m
doing not good I didn’t go to business
school only 2.7 percent of female CEO
startups get funding the odds are
against us I shouldn’t do this her
response was so what just go for it
what’s the worst that can happen it’ll
be another failure to learn from so she
summoned the comp
and courage that I helped her find and
she went into that meeting with a power
and fire that could only be created by
accepting and embracing the possibility
of more failure by just going for it we
came out with our first two million in
it was a good day since that first race
we have continued to grow our business
from a small founding team to a powerful
team of 30 we have continued to raise
more funding and through our success we
have continued to experience failure
time and time again our one constant
aside from always having each other when
we fail we fail fast we fix fast and we
learn fast when you look at failure that
way when you embrace it the times you
fail are not definitive they become part
of the journey the bumps in the road
that make you bigger better and tougher
we’re not standing up here today telling
you that the courage to fail is all it
takes in the end it takes hard work it
takes dedication and it takes a will to
just keep pushing through and maybe some
sessions crying on the floor Elon Musk
says that if you’re not failing you’re
not innovating enough this is true in
business and it’s also true in life
failure is inevitable what you do with it now that’s up to you